The Sacred and the Secular University
Jon H. Roberts and James Turner. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000, 184 pp.
Reviewed by Lonnie D. Kliever
Jon Roberts and James Turner have weighed in alongside George M. Marsden’s The Soul of the American University (reviewed in the September–October 1994 issue of Academe) and James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light (reviewed in the January–February 2000 issue) with still another account of the changing relationship of religion and American colleges and universities. Briefer in compass but more penetrating in insight than its rivals, this new study challenges their claim that the secularizing of American higher education resulted from a broad rejection of, and even hostility to, religion.
This book, like the earlier accounts, acknowledges that multiple elements were at work in secularizing higher education. The most important include the founding and growth of public universities, the influence of European ideals of scholarly inquiry, the professionalization of the faculty, and the refinement of scientific procedures in gaining knowledge of the natural world. While recognizing these factors, Roberts and Turner offer a more precise explanation of the role religion played in changing universities and colleges. They challenge the "hard thesis" that the loss of religious sponsorship fundamentally changed colleges and universities and that religion has been excluded from the modern college and university.
Focusing on the intellectual development of colleges and universities during the period between the Civil War and World War I, Roberts and Turner single out two critical innovations as the primary drivers of change. "Methodological naturalism" in the sciences separated the sciences from dependence on religious support and freed the sciences from contributing to religious apologetics. "Philological historicism" in the humanities freed the humanities from an explicitly religious pedagogy and empowered the humanities to explore the culturally varied forms of human consciousness, including religion. These new controlling frameworks for the pursuit of knowledge unwittingly but inexorably dissolved the synergy between religion and the arts and sciences that characterized the antebellum colleges.
The authors make their case by presenting extended discussions of the sciences and the humanities. In "Part One: The Sciences," Roberts demonstrates that science in the antebellum colleges was "the very handmaiden of religion." The study of science was thought to "ennoble and purify the mind" and to "lead us upward to the fountain of all wisdom." This "doxological" view of science heightened the prestige and encouraged the expansion of scientific knowledge.
But the success of science turned it into a Trojan Horse as scientists increasingly limited their discussions and explanations to natural phenomena. Their studies became increasingly specialized as they refined their methods of investigation and narrowed their range of inquiry. In taking this course, scientists effectively promoted the detachment of the scientific enterprise from religious affirmations and apologetics. The triumph of methodological naturalism undermined the need for the religious framework that integrated and valorized all knowledge in the antebellum colleges. Even more damaging to the fortunes of religion was the spirit of scientific inquiry with its emphasis on empirical data and rational proof. Scientific inquiry became the bar by which all knowledge was measured. Scientific knowledge gained a privileged place in the academic mission of higher education.
In "Part Two: The Humanities," Turner argues that it was not the natural or social sciences that had the most profound effect on the academy, but the newly developed humanities. Curiously enough, the humanities saved the universities and colleges from the worst "embarrassments" of secularization. The humanities did not so much dispel religion as displace it. They filled the gaps caused by the disappearance of the standard courses in moral philosophy and natural theology by presenting the whole range of the inner life of human consciousness and sensibility. As such, the new humanities provided a nondogmatic "spiritual" center for the modern arts and sciences university.
As early as the late eighteenth century, the classical curriculum of Greek and Latin in the antebellum colleges had been expanded to include cultural studies of literature, philosophy, art history, and general history. Of course, these studies were subservient to the religious norms and purposes of the founding religious traditions. But the proliferation of these specialized studies contributed to the breakup of the unifying framework provided by religion.
The humanities sought to fill that curricular vacuum by trolling the waters of European civilization, selecting those catches that demonstrated a universal spirituality and morality. But this turn toward a wider history proved the undoing of such Romantic notions of unity. A "new humanities" emerged by way of innovative refinements in hermeneutics—a "philological historicism" that recognized the unique and contingent history of every human phenomenon. While not preserving the unity of knowledge, philological historicism legitimated the diversity of knowledge. Thereby, the modern university with its emphasis on disciplinary specialization and cultural diversity was fully born.
Clearly, the triumph of naturalism and specialization marginalized the place of religion in the educational enterprise. This intellectual marginalization, rather than some self-conscious drive for secularization, was the crucial factor in the disengagement of colleges and universities from their founding religious traditions and purposes. The other contributing causes, mentioned above and spelled out in detail by other studies of the secularization of higher education, would not have succeeded apart from these changes at the heart of the educational enterprise. The birthright of Christian education was not stolen by skeptics and rationalists. It died the death of a thousand intellectual qualifications.
By focusing on the crucial period of intellectual changes in the educational enterprise, Roberts and Turner have greatly clarified the separation of the modern university from religious controls and content. Though they do not discuss the possibility directly, they have also shown a new place for religion in the university. Modern universities and colleges enjoy a new openness to the study of religion in its manifold forms and traditions. They are free to attend to the many religions, acknowledging their variety, appreciating their vitality, exploring their successes, and criticizing their failures. The loss of religious controls has not banished religion from the academy. Religion is welcome so long as it takes its place alongside of other cultural forms of human consciousness and sensibility.
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